Towards the close of his Lanzelet, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven
tells us the source for his work: a certain Hugh de Morville, who
had been sent to Germany as a hostage to secure the release of
Richard the Lionheart, had brought with him daz welschez buoch
von Lanzelete, which Ulrich was prevailed on by his
vriunde to translate into German. This being around 1194,
Ulrich's verse romance is one of the very earliest Arthurian
romances in German, and thus an important source for the early
reception of French romance in Germany, and for the development of
Arthurian romance altogether. But what French romance did Ulrich
translate? Possibly the most important aspect of the Lancelot story
as it is commonly known is the love affair between Lancelot and
Arthur's queen, Guinevere; this features in the earliest extant
French work on this character, Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot
(or Le chevalier de la Charrette). In Ulrich's work,
however, there is no such affair, and the trajectory of the hero's
story is quite different. Modern scholarship has often taken the
German text to be a direct representative of a lost, parallel
French tradition, with some controversy as to whether this was
Anglo-Norman or continental French; some scholars, however, have
seen in Hugh de Morville a fictional source, much like Wolfram von
Eschenbach's Kyot. Until recently, relatively little attention has
been paid to examining Ulrich's text from a literary point of view,
not least because it has often been thought to lack any outstanding
literary qualities.

Ulrich's Lanzelet is born to a powerful but unpopular king called
Pant, who dies shortly after his birth; the hero is then adopted by
a fairy queen, who brings him up, but conceals from him his name.
He goes forth into the world to learn his name, and along the way
learns the arts of knighthood, kills a number of clearly evil
characters and has quite explicitly sexual affairs with young women
connected to them (the daughter of one, the niece of another),
finally marrying the daughter of an unloved king Iweret. At this
point, a fairy maiden arrives and tells him his name; shortly
afterward, Lanzelet and his wife Iblis encounter a page from the
Arthurian court (where the Lanzelet, as the unnamed knight, had
already earned a reputation as the best of them all), saying that
Guinevere has been claimed by Valerin, who demands that a knight
conquer him otherwise he shall take away Arthur's queen; Lanzelet
defeats Valerin easily. At this point, he decides that he must
avenge an insult suffered early on in his career at a castle called
Pluris, but having done so, he is captured by the queen of Pluris
and kept imprisoned by her as her lover (not, it must be said,
entirely without his own pleasure, much as he misses his wife). At
Arthur's court, Lanzelet's absence is lamented, and as the knights
lament, a magic robe is brought to the court by a messenger of the
fairy queen, who also tells those assembled about Lanzelet's
unhappy fate. The cloak is presented in sequence to the great
ladies present, but does not fit any of them perfectly, a fact that
reveals that each of them has some flaw or other, which is
explained to all present by the fairy. Finally Iblis, sorrowful
because of her husband's absence and reluctant to take part in any
festivities, is prevailed on to try the cloak: it fits her
perfectly, for she is, like her husband, perfect. After she has
been acclaimed as the epitome of womanhood, four great knights of
Arthur's court set off to free Lanzelet, something they achieve
without much trouble. Shortly after he has been freed, however, we
learn that Guinevere has been abducted by Valerin; the Arthurian
knights seek the help of the magician Malduc, an enemy of theirs
and Arthur's, who agrees to help if he receives Erec and Gawain as
hostages. After Guinevere is freed, these two knights must indeed
go into imprisonment, but Lanzelet arranges a campaign against
Malduc that goes off without a hitch, and Erec and Gawain are freed
easily. Finally, Lanzelet hears of a magical bearded dragon that
asks knights for a kiss, but has not yet managed to get one; he
goes off and kisses the dragon, which is turned into a beautiful
woman. Now Lanzelet returns home to claim his inheritance, the
lands ruled by his father; the nobles there are happy to have him
as king. He then goes to claim rule over the lands of Iblis's
father, and achieves this objective once again without any
difficulty. After some festivities with Arthur as a guest, we are
told that Lanzelet and Iblis rule happily ever after, and the
romance comes to a close.

This is not the place to go into the varying opinions voiced in the
scholarship about the qualities of this work; the relative lack of
conflict has always been recognized as one of the most important
features. Lanzelet is perfect; he has to do almost nothing to
attain this perfection; and there are no real obstacles in his way.
Nevertheless, he has to go through various stages of accruing ever
more perfection, and these can be seen as showing the audience
various aspects of knighthood and nobility that need to be
acquired. Some scholars have perceived a didactic tone in this
narrative, whereas others see it as purely entertainment; it has
also been read as providing a moral about the importance of
political stability during an unstable time in German history.
Regardless of modern evaluations, it is clear from various
references in later literature, as well as the modest but by no
means insignificant manuscript tradition (two complete witnesses
and four fragments), that the text was quite well-known in medieval
Germany. This, along with the interest increasingly shown by modern
scholarship in Ulrich's work and the results of the sophisticated
readings that have been published in recent decades, suggests that,
although certainly not as rich in interpretative interest as the
better known Arthurian romances in Germany, Lanzelet is
nevertheless a text worth a read, and worth bringing to a wider
audience through modern editions and translations.

The two complete witnesses (Vienna, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2698, early fourteenth century: W;
Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, cpg 371, 1420: P) present quite
different texts, and it is only in 2006 that a proper critical
edition was produced, by Florian Kragl. [1] Kragl correctly
refrained from trying to harmonize W and P, and instead presented a
normalized text from W as the main text, with the varying passages
of P and the fragments in a parallel column (without normalisation,
but occasionally emended), and an apparatus with notes on
emendations, scribal corrections, and so on. In addition, he
provided a second apparatus with the variants of earlier edition,
and a third apparatus with linguistic notes. All of this is
accompanied by a translation, extensive introduction and
commentary, and a diplomatic text of the manuscripts. Kragl's two
volumes are clearly the text to work with for serious research, but
despite the entertainment value of the text, these tomes are
equally clearly unsuitable for bedtime reading, or even classroom
teaching Aware of this, Kragl soon enough produced a paperback
"Studienausgabe," which, apart from being eminently affordable
(unlike the full two-volume edition, which costs literally ten
times as much), presents the text and apparatus, translation, and
greatly condensed introduction and notes, which are nevertheless
very useful. [2] For students of Middle High German (or other
readers) with modern German, this latter edition of Kragl's is
without question the text to use. Lanzelet has also been
translated into English before, and indeed quite recently: in 2005,
Thomas Kerth brought out his translation of the text in Columbia's
"Records of Western Civilization" series. This is published without
the German text, and in running prose, but with very extensive
introduction and notes. [3]

Meyer's volume is almost three times the price of Kerth's, and
without wishing in any way to disparage what is clearly the fruit
of a great deal of hard work, I cannot help wondering what this
work offers to make it worth the price. The cost of this volume is
not Meyer's fault, of course, but, given the alternatives
available, it rather seems to defeat the purpose, which one would
assume is to bring this text to a wider, Anglophone audience that,
despite having little or no modern German, might nevertheless be
interested in having a Middle High German text along with the
translation. From comparing random passages, I cannot see that
Meyer's translation is a noticeable improvement on Kerth's;
although she does follow the German closely, and the presence of
the text enables us to work back to the original from the
translation, Meyer is occasionally a bit too free for my taste, and
sometimes (albeit rarely), this freeness veers towards inaccuracy
(to be fair, I would not say Kerth's translation is flawless
either). To cite some examples: at l. 13, "swer niemen für den
andern hât" should be translated "whoever prefers no one over
another" (Meyer translates the verb as "distinguish"); at l. 658
"kint" clearly refers to unmarried girls, rather than "children" as
Meyer has it; at l. 1410 "bestuonden" must mean "attacked", and is
clearly not Meyer's "stood against," which makes little sense.
Meyer also provides a briefer introduction and much less in the way
of notes than either Kragl's condensed edition, or Kerth's
translation. What she does give us that Kerth does not is a Middle
High German text--and indeed a text different from that of Kragl;
it is debatable whether this is much of an advantage, given that it
is unlikely that any serious scholarship would wish to cite Meyer's
text over Kragl's. While recognizing Kragl's concerns regarding the
difficulties in producing a harmonized critical edition, Meyer
nevertheless does precisely that, printing a single normalized text
with the sections from P that are missing in W in italics;
elsewhere, P's wording is provided as variants in the apparatus,
and in the sometimes not insignificant passages (from one to
several lines in length) where the P diverges to such an extent
from W that a single text cannot be created, Meyer prints P's text
in the apparatus, with a translation given in the notes.

What we get, therefore, is a usable text that cannot (and does not
intend to) replace that of the standard edition, but will allow us
to follow how the manuscripts diverge from each other; a competent
line-by-line translation that enables us to work back from the
translation to the original; and very little in the way of
introductory or interpretative matter to accompany text and
translation. All of this comes at higher price than Kerth's English
translation and Kragl's paperback "Studienausgabe" put together.
While I would like to recommend the purchase of this volume for
libraries anyway, in our present cash-strapped times, such an
expenditure would seem a little hard to justify.